In Hunt For Clinton Emails, GOP Activist Cited Top Trump Campaign Officials

A Republican activist who sought to obtain and publicize emails he thought were hacked from Hillary Clinton’s private server cited senior Trump campaign officials in a document he circulated to recruit computer security experts to his effort, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Officials named in the document compiled by the late Peter W. Smith, who launched his effort in September 2016, include Steve Bannon, then-campaign CEO and current chief White House strategist; Kellyanne Conway, then-campaign manager and now White House counselor; Sam Clovis, a former campaign policy adviser and now an adviser in the Department of Agriculture; and Michael Flynn, then a top campaign adviser and briefly Trump’s national security adviser, according to the Journal.

The report said the purpose of including those Trump aides in the document was unclear, and the recruitment document includes no indication that the campaign supported Smith’s efforts. The White House, Agriculture Department, and Flynn all did not respond to the Journal’s requests for comment.

Bannon told the newspaper he never heard of Smith or KLS Research LLC, the company Smith founded to hunt for Clinton’s emails. Conway acknowledged knowing of the longtime GOP activist, who cut his teeth in the 1990s funding opposition research and lawsuits against then-President Bill Clinton, but said she “never met with him” during the 2016 campaign.

Smith, who died only 10 days after the Journal interviewed him, repeatedly claimed ties to members of Trump’s inner circle, particularly Flynn, to drum up support for his project. Smith was bent on obtaining Clinton’s emails and making them public before Election Day at all costs, and told computer security experts he contacted that Russian hackers would be the likeliest source, according to the newspaper.

How little he cared about the emails’ source was made plain in his phone communications with Matt Tait, a cybersecurity expert who wrote a post on LawFare recounting his involvement with Smith.

According to Tait, Smith was contacted by a source from the “Dark Web” who said he had emails ripped from Clinton’s private server, and he wanted Tait to validate whether they were real.

“Although it wasn’t initially clear to me how independent Smith’s operation was from Flynn or the Trump campaign, it was immediately apparent that Smith was both well connected within the top echelons of the campaign and he seemed to know both Lt. Gen. Flynn and his son well,” Tait wrote. “Smith routinely talked about the goings on at the top of the Trump team, offering deep insights into the bizarre world at the top of the Trump campaign.”

Tait, who passed the recruitment document from Smith citing Trump campaign officials on to the Journal, wrote that Smith repeatedly noted that he created KLS Research with the explicit intent of avoiding campaign reporting laws. He was left with the impression that “the group was formed with the blessing of the Trump campaign.”